Real-Time is the new Web2.0: Both mean nothing.
March 5, 2010
So you come across a startup that’s pitching a “Real-Time” service, what do you do? Punch them in the face – now that’s real-time! Well, maybe that’s a bad idea, but you should completely tell them they’re not getting anywhere just by calling their service “Real-Time”. Here are some examples of concepts which can’t ever be real-time:
1. The News – Maybe if people as a whole were more intelligent, but, the closest you’re going to get is Digg or Reddit and those require thousands of data points (over time) before an article bubbles to the top of the relevancy list. The exception of course is “Bad News”, that could easily be done in real-time.
2. Product Pricing - Retailers have a hard enough time with loss prevention and maintaining profits than to care if their published prices and inventory are accurate or not. Sure, they have real-time inventory internally, but that’s a large enough dataset that it’ll never be replicated to a service provider; the short story is that you’ll never be able to get both an instant price and instant data at the same time.
Maybe if you were Google.
3. Search (sites, news, or otherwise) – Indexing is hard and there’s only one cat in the game with the facilities to do so in real-time. The only problem is the rest of the world doesn’t have a supercomputer running their system and there will always be a delay before Google gets the memo. The exceptions here are sites that Google cares about but chances are you’re not going to be big enough for that, else, you probably wouldn’t be a startup.
4. Communications – There’s already an “app for that”. It’s called the phone and your voice. Pickup phone, call friend, profit. Anything else might provide real-time delivery on one end or the other, but chances are, one person in the party is playing a video game, watching youtube, or chatting on Facebook in which case their response will be in Internet time.
Let me just steal the definition of Real-Time from Wikipedia:
In computer science, real-time computing (RTC), or “reactive computing”, is the study of hardware and software systems that are subject to a “real-time constraint”—i.e., operational deadlines from event to system response. By contrast, a non-real-time system is one for which there is no deadline, even if fast response or high performance is desired or preferred. The needs of real-time software are often addressed in the context of real-time operating systems, and synchronous programming languages, which provide frameworks on which to build real-time application software.
If that’s not your product then please, stop calling yourself real-time and get an old comp sci book, then figure out what real-time really is.
